Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Vol. 30 (1) Spring 2011, 39–46 © 2011, American Marketing Association ISSN: 0743-9156 (print), 1547-7207 (electronic) 39 Beyond Poverty: Social Justice in a Global Marketplace Linda Scott, Jerome D. Williams, Stacey Menzel Baker, Jan Brace-Govan, Hilary Downey, Anne-Marie Hakstian, Geraldine Rosa Henderson, Peggy Sue Loroz, and Dave Webb The social justice paradigm, developed in philosophy by John Rawls and others, reaches limits when confronted with diverse populations, unsound governments, and global markets. Its parameters are further limited by a traditional utilitarian approach to both industrial actors and consumer behaviors. Finally, by focusing too exclusively on poverty, as manifested in insufficient incomes or resources, the paradigm overlooks the oppressive role that gender, race, and religious prejudice play in keeping the poor subordinated. The authors suggest three ways in which marketing researchers could bring their unique expertise to the question of social justice in a global economy: by (1) reinventing the theoretical foundation laid down by thinkers such as Rawls, (2) documenting and evaluating emergent “feasible fixes” to achieve justice (e.g., the global resource dividend, cause-related marketing, Fair Trade, philanthrocapitalism), and (3) exploring the parameters of the consumption basket that would be minimally required to achieve human capabilities. Keywords: social justice, poverty, bottom of the pyramid, distributive justice, discrimination Linda Scott is DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Oxford (e-mail: linda.scott@sbs.ox.ac.uk). Jerome D. Williams is Prudential Chair in Business and Research Director at the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (e-mail: jerome2@business.rutgers. edu). Stacey Menzel Baker is Associate Professor of Marketing and Sustainable Business Practices, University of Wyoming (e-mail: smbaker@uwyo.edu). Jan Brace-Govan is Senior Lecturer, Monash University (e-mail: Jan.Brace-Govan@monash.edu). Hilary Downey is Lecturer in Management, Queen’s University, Belfast (e-mail: Hilary. downey@qub.ac.uk). Anne-Marie Hakstian is Associate Professor, Salem State University (e-mail: annemarie.hakstian@salemstate.edu). Geraldine Rosa Henderson is Associate Professor of Integrated Mar- keting Communications, University of Texas at Austin (e-mail: gerri@ mail.utexas.edu). Peggy Sue Loroz is Associate Professor of Market- ing, Gonzaga University (e-mail: loroz@jepson.gonzaga.edu). Dave Webb is Associate Professor, University of Western Australia (e-mail: dave.webb@uwa.edu.au). The coauthors of this essay represent all the participants in the Social Justice Track at the 2009 Transforma- tive Consumer Research Conference. Jerome D. Williams and Linda Scott cochaired the track and were the lead authors in developing this essay. All others are listed alphabetically. G lobal justice cannot be understood on the model of social justice, at least not for the foreseeable future,” pronounced David Miller in the first chapter of Princi- ples of Social Justice (1999, p. 19). Miller, a leading thinker in the philosophical debates over “social justice”—a term used interchangeably with “economic justice” and “distrib- utive justice”—surveys the basic assumptions underpinning that discourse and offers the proposition that distributive justice has been made unachievable by the transnational face of global markets and the perceived fragmentation of national identity in the West. Although some scholars have traced its origins back to Aristotle, the modern concept of social justice begins with Adam Smith and is strongly rooted in the utilitarian and empiricist traditions of Britain and the United States, with special debts to Hume, Locke, Mill, and Bentham (Fleis- chacker 2004; Frohlich 2007). The notion fully emerged only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the social, political, and economic circumstances of these two Western democracies uniquely created the setting for the idea that all citizens should be able to claim some form of material equality (Fleischacker 2004; Miller 1991). However, this same distinctive confluence has also circumscribed the first principles, tacit assumptions, and pervasive prejudices, leaving the philosophical principle of social justice—when many quarters call for global material justice—oddly bound by self-imposed national borders and a requirement for cul- tural homogeneity. Thus, despite the initially positive influ- ence of thinkers such as Rawls (1999) on policy development in marketing (see Laczniak and Murphy 2008), academics in the marketing field hoping to build a stream of study aimed at achieving distributive justice in the global econ- omy will need to reinvent the theoretical basis substantially.